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It doesn't matter which distribution I run. The driver would run fine on Slackware 14 (kernel 3.2), so it has no problem with my distribution (by the way, Slackware's development branch is not really bleeding edge, many packages are older).
The point is only one thing that prevents the driver from running, it is the kernel.

Yes, but none of the "supported" distributions use 3.7 per default yet I think. You get compatibility with 3.7 as soon as ubuntu stable releases have 3.7.

Originally Posted by Vim_User

So I will adhere to my decision: AMD, as long as you are so fucked up I will not spend one cent on your hardware and I will not recommend to buy AMD video hardware to Linux users.

That's sad because then you don't give them money for their open source driver than either.

Originally Posted by Vim_User

Since my laptop (not meant for hardcore gaming) needs to be replaced anyways I will look for Intel hardware this time

Intel graphics is actually pretty good. While many people complain about team fortress 2 not running with decent performance with amd gpus it runs very well with ivy bridge. Counter Strike source is well playable too, but it has still some rendering errors (sometimes flashing artifacts). Trackmania nations in wine and flatout 2 in wine work very well too. Of course not with antialiasing, but it works. If you wait for the next gen intel gpus, it will be quite usable for many games I think.

Yes, but none of the "supported" distributions use 3.7 per default yet I think. You get compatibility with 3.7 as soon as ubuntu stable releases have 3.7.

Than they should rename their drivers into Ubuntu drivers, as long as they name them Linux drivers one could be tempted to think that a driver supports the latest stable Linux version (especially when you see that distro developers have no problem with coming up with patches to make it work). 3.8 was released a few days ago, so that it is not supported yet can be excused, but 3.7 was released over 2 months ago, there is absolutely no excuse for not supporting that.

That's sad because then you don't give them money for their open source driver than either.

May be sad, but it is a chicken and egg problem: AMD doesn't support Linux properly, so I won't give them my money. AMD does not have money, so they don't support Linux properly. The problem here is that AMD does have no money because their marketing guys and the people in their headquarters are morons.

Intel graphics is actually pretty good. While many people complain about team fortress 2 not running with decent performance with amd gpus it runs very well with ivy bridge. Counter Strike source is well playable too, but it has still some rendering errors (sometimes flashing artifacts). Trackmania nations in wine and flatout 2 in wine work very well too. Of course not with antialiasing, but it works. If you wait for the next gen intel gpus, it will be quite usable for many games I think.

I will mostly run older games on that machine /Serious Sam First/Second Encounter, ...) and not so demanding games (Civilization IV, ...), so the performance of the newer Intel GPUs is more than sufficient for me.

It is not needed to give AMD money for open source devs. Do you give Intel money to pay em? No, you just buy the product because it is good. Until Steam for Linux was there AMD just thought there is no market for Linux games and now they still seem to be still surprised that somebody wants to play OpenGL games. When you know that the average fix time for bugs that I personally found in the OpenGL part of the driver was around 10-12 months then you know how little importance OpenGL had for AMD. You can not call OpenGL a Linux specific thing, you could better recall what happened when Rage was released. Somehow AMD fixed issues for the developers but not for everybody else and therefore Rage got bad ratings. It is still not possible to play Rage with wine without crashes. I think it worked with one driver at the ned of last year but seems to be broken again. When a company is not able to provide proper OpenGL drivers then customers should simply avoid em. The thing with unsupported kernels is bad as well but at least you could fix it on your own - but you can not fix speed issues or driver crashes. OSS drivers for legacy hardware sounds nice, is nice when they work out of the box, but is bad when things like powermanagement is broken if you own a laptop and it overheats or if you have to pay more money to your power authorities. I hope that the PS4 will use something similar than OpenGL that it will get more love from AMD.

Intel graphics is actually pretty good. While many people complain about team fortress 2 not running with decent performance with amd gpus it runs very well with ivy bridge. Counter Strike source is well playable too, but it has still some rendering errors (sometimes flashing artifacts). Trackmania nations in wine and flatout 2 in wine work very well too. Of course not with antialiasing, but it works. If you wait for the next gen intel gpus, it will be quite usable for many games I think.

Do you realize that the next gen games will be even tougher on the hardware ?

If rumors are true, it will be the next gen Trinity mobile APU or some variant of it.

Way too slow. If by 'variant' you include things like the PS4 APU, then, sure; it may contain some "variant" of the next gen APU. But the next gen APU going in desktops will be a totally different beast.

About TF2 micro stutters: they're now gone, the newest update to the source engine fixed it for AMD cards, it seems.

About AMD and OpenGL: yes, nVidia's Linux drivers are far better at the moment but then again, the PS4 is going to utilize OpenGL and AMD APUs. As such they might now be interested in looking into their OpenGL performance which - in turn - MIGHT lead to improvements for Linux, too. Same goes for Android and iOS: OpenGL ES. IF AMD wants to set foot into that area, too (and it seems they want to, seeing that they're working on the Jaguar for tablets) they'll better get their mess sorted, because their hardware was never bad (even the FX CPUs are not bad), but drivers are usually lacking or they're placing their bets on the wrong horse.
Nonetheless, I'll buy a new graphic's card in about 6-8 months and I'll just buy whatever has better support at that time for Linux. I'm absolutely indifferent and don't care about staying with one brand, I just utilize whatever fits my needs best.

We have reported all problems to ATI, we are contacting them on daily basis sometimes.... but the fixes are just not there yet. We really cannot _force_ them to work faster. I guess you have to understand that their situation is not too rosy at the moment with all the layoffs etc.... we are hoping for some improvements soon.

I guess Mr. Ladavac has raised an interesting point: AMD is really suffering at the moment, nearly being crushed between Intel (CPUs) and nVidia (GPUs), so I really DO hope that they'll recover as their hardware is (as said before) not bad. Sony wouldn't have chosen the Jaguar if it wasn't a good APU.

I don't get why sony would choose jaguar tho.... It's not that fast on a clock for clock basis (IPC) and it is a fairly low clock.. As well it has 8 cores and will be a bitch to get that much parallelism (TLP) out of it...

It should be as smooth as a hot knife through warm butter though with that many cores going unused and with that much memory bandwidth.